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Precognitive dreams are dreams that have been credited with foresight or precognition. It is a phenomenon that has fascinated and puzzled mankind for thousands of years. Precognition is typically defined as knowing or perceiving events before they actually occur. According to Carl Jung,^[1] psychic energy might be operative. It could also be seen as a Premonition.

Contents 1 Anecdotal evidence 2 Clinical evidence 3 Skepticism 4 See also 5 References 6 Further reading 7 External links

[edit] Anecdotal evidence

The anecdotal evidence for precognitive dreaming has been documented since before Biblical times. Prior to invading Italy, Hannibal asked for a dream about his future military activities. He was shown winning decisive victories and decided to persevere in his conquest of Italy.^{[citation needed]}

The day before his defeat at Waterloo, Napoleon dreamt of a large black cat (a symbol of bad luck) lying down with his troops.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Clinical evidence

Dr. Robert Van de Castle summarizes some of the key progress points in the area of psychic dream research in his book Our Dreaming Mind. In 1819, H. M. Wesserman successfully projected messages to experimental subjects while they slept and dreamed. While the general content of the dream was successfully received, some of the characters in the dreams were changed.^[2]

An Italian psychiatrist, Dr. G. C. Ermacora, published a paper in 1895 titled “Telepathic Dreams Experimentally Induced”. This work documented successful efforts of a medium to transmit dreams to a young girl. Perhaps the best-known research in this field was conducted at Maimonides Medical Center, in Brooklyn, New York by Stanley Krippner and Montigue Ullman in 1964. These trials clearly showed positive correlations for transmitting information to dreamers who had no prior knowledge of the subject material. Dr. Van de Castle himself was a subject during these sessions and achieved considerable success in having dreams that were closely correlated to the target pictures.^{[citation needed]}

Dr. Van de Castle further documents the evidence for psychic dreaming based on a fascinating questionnaire approach. Survey questions sent to several thousand individuals listed in Who’s Who In America resulted in 430 replies claiming some kind of ESP experience and dreams were involved in 25 percent of these cases.^{[citation needed]}

Dr. Louisa Rhine at the Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke University compiled by far the best-known and largest body of such dream evidence. Dr. Rhine collected over 7000 accounts of ESP experiences. The majority of these accounts were dream related and were seemingly precognitive in nature. The material for this work was collected by advertisements in various well-known popular media.^{[citation needed]}

Dr. David Ryback, a psychologist in Atlanta, used a questionnaire survey approach to investigate precognitive dreaming in college students. His survey of over 433 participants showed that 290 or 66.9 percent reported some form of paranormal dream. Using very rigid standards, Dr. Ryback examined those responding to the survey. He rejected many of these claims and reached a conclusion that 8.8 percent of the population was having actual precognitive dreams.^[3]

[edit] Skepticism

An early -and perhaps the first formal- inquiry into this phenomenon was done by Aristotle in his On Divination in Sleep. His criticism of these claims appeals to the fact that "the sender of such dreams should be God", and "the fact that those to whom he sends them are not the best and wisest, but merely commonplace persons." Thus: "Most [so-called prophetic] dreams are, however, to be classed as mere coincidences...", here "coincidence" being defined by Aristotle as that which does not take "place according to a universal or general rule" and referring to things which are not of themselves by necessity causally connected, his example being taking a walk during an eclipse, neither the walk nor the eclipse being apparently causally connected and so only by "coincidence" do they occur simultaneously.^[4]

Other researchers in this area are more guarded in their reports on the value or use of dreams. In his book The Interpretation of Dreams, first published at the end of the 19th century, Sigmund Freud argued that the foundation of all dream content is the fulfillment of wishes, conscious or not and devoid of psychic content. In his discussions with Carl Jung, he referred to parapsychology and precognition as “nonsensical.”

Phillip Goldberg favors the use of intuition but endorses the idea that dreams are sometimes a doorway to the intuitive manifestation of a prophecy, a solution, and a result.^[5]

Some psychologists have explained the apparent prevalence of precognitive dreams in terms of memory biases, namely a selective memory for accurate predictions and distorted memory so that dreams are retrospectively fitted onto subsequent events.^[6] In one experiment, subjects were asked to write down their dreams in a diary. This prevented the selective memory effect, and the dreams no longer seemed accurate about the future.^[7] Another experiment gave subjects a fake diary of a student with apparently precognitive dreams. This diary described events from the person's life, as well as some predictive dreams and some non-predictive dreams. When subjects were asked to recall the dreams they had read, they remembered more of the successful predictions than unsuccessful ones.^[8]

Dream researcher Ernest Hartman comments on current dream theories proposed by biologists. One such theory suggests that dreams are basically random nonsense and are the product of a poorly functioning brain during sleep. If there is any meaning to dreams, it is added on later as our brains try to make the best of a bad job. A second theory suggests that dreaming is an “unlearning process in” which our brains bring up material to be thrown out like a computer attempting to clean itself of things we do not need to remember. In either case, the predictive value of dreams is moot.^[9][10]

Michael Shermer, author of the book "Why People Believe Weird Things", also notes that dreams and precognitive impressions are of limited value in predicting future events ^[11]. In a companion publication, "The Skeptic Encyclopedia of Pseudoscience", this same author refers to the images and stories arising within dreams as merely products of a “fertile and easily overwhelmed imagination.”^[12].

Dreams which appear to be precognitive may in fact be the result of the "Law of Large Numbers". Robert Todd Carroll, author of "The Skeptic's Dictionary" put it this way:

"Say the odds are a million to one that when a person has a dream of an airplane crash, there is an airplane crash the next day. With 6 billion people having an average of 250 dream themes each per night, there should be about 1.5 million people a day who have dreams that seem clairvoyant."^[13]

[edit] See also

• An Experiment with Time
• Intutition
• Precognition
• Metaphysical
• Dreams
• Parapsychology
• Notable dreams throughout history

[edit] References

[edit] Further reading

• Dreams – My Lamp Unto the Darkness

• Barrett, Deirdre, PhD .”The Committee Of Sleep”. New York: Crown Publishers, 2001

• Quinn, Adriene. “Dreams of History That Came True”. Tacoma: Dream Research, 1987.

• Reed, Henry, PhD. “Getting Help From Your Dreams”. Virginia Beach: Inner Vision Publishing, 1985.
• Thurston, Mark. PhD. “Tonight’s Answers To Tomorrow’s Questions”. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988.

[edit] External links

• International Association for the Study of Dreams Guidance on dreams from a clinical approach with little emphasis on precognition
• Skeptical Inquirer
• Intuitive Connections
• www.edgarcayce.org
• stockdreams.org
• President Abraham Lincoln's Presentient Dream About the Assassination